Life & Loss
A Guide to Helping Grieving Children. 2nd Edition

by Linda Goldman

Today's chidlren experience many different types of loss.  From the loss of a pet to the loss of a close friend or family member, children grieve for many reasons. Violent events in the world around them teach harsh lessons abut life and death, while perosnal  losses closer to home make those lessons a startling reality. In a society that has difficulty dealing with loss, adults often need a guide throught the maze of thoughts and feelings that such events evoke for themselves and the children they care for.

Life and Loss is such a guide. Each page stimulates the mind, heart   and common sense to work together to create a caring environment for kids. The author presents a lovingly positive approach to help children face some of life's most difficult issues, and she invites us to see these issues through the inner worlds of the child.

Photographs are placed throughut the book to remind readers of the unique nature of the child's world, and to suggest ways for adults to enter into it. This user-friendly book is appropriate for educators, clergy, health professionals, and parents alike, and will help readers to:

 

• Recognize and undertand different types of children's losses

• Become aware of the myths and the stiflng cliches that hinder the grief processLearn the four psychological tasks of grief 

• Help a child say good-bye to a dying loved one

• Discover ways for childrn to commemorate personal losses through funerals, memorials, memory books and other grief related techniques for therapists, educators, and parents

• Gain understandings and tasks for a comunity grief team

• Find community and national resources, grief camps, websites

• Easily locate other grief books and resources with an extensive annotated bibliography

By urging us to "tune in" to the special world of children, Life and Loss teaches us how to approach the delicate task of helping young people through the grief process with care, understanding, and love.

"This is a fantastically complete teaching manual for everyone working/living/loving with grieving children. The layout is state of the art and extremely simple..filled with photographs, beautifully laid out pages, pictures drawn by children, actual letters and stories by kids, and family stories. It's more than 145 pages of valuable information. If every parent, teacher, clergy person and case worker read this manual, the lives of our children would be made much more simple, more caring, and we would all be the richer for it." - Bereavement Magazine

"...an excellent guide to helping children deal with different kinds of loss. One of the most valuable parts of this book is the annotated bibliography. It is an excellent resource for anyone who is dealing with life's harshest moments. No parent, teacher, or counselor should be without a copy of this book." - Counseling Connection

"A simply terrific book that grabs your hand and takes you to the playground. Linda Goldman has put together by far the most user-friendly guide we've read. Goes way beyond understanding grief to understand the child." - Centering Corporation

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Children entering this new millennium are faced with life issues that were unspeakable to us growing up as children. Death related tragedies such as suicide, homicide, and AIDS, and non-death related traumas such as divorce and separation, foster care and abandonment, bullying and terrorism, and abuse and violence have left our children sitting alone in their homes, unfocused and unmotivated in their classrooms, and terrorized in their
communities. They are overwhelmed with their feelings and distracted by their thoughts.

Survivorship of these traumas creates for any child a loss of their assumptive world of safety, protection, and predictability. The role of the media as a surrogate communal parent and extended family further creates
this same traumatic loss of this assumptive world for many if not most of our children.

Children naturally assume their world will be filled with safety, kindness, and meaning as they attempt to answer the universal questions of who am I and why am I here. All too often these qualities seem to disappears into a nightmarish universe of randomness, isolation, and unpredictability. This leaves many of todayıs young people immersed in a new assumption: There is no future. There is no safety. There is no connectedness or meaning to my life. By joining together as a global grief team, caring adults can co-create an assumptive world that again provides a childıs birthright to presume love, generosity, and value will be integral parts of their lives.

We are raising a segment of our youth that are numbed, disconnected from their hearts, their minds, and their consciousnesses, and choosing all to easily, other alternatives such as drugs and alcohol, crime and violence as ways of coping with the loss of their assumptive world. In yesterdayıs world we may have protected ourselves from trauma by having fire drills in our schools. In todayıs world our kids protect themselves from danger in the schools by having gun-fire drills. Too many of todayıs school children are grieving children. So many of our boys and girls are born into a world of grief and loss issues that live inside their homes and lay waiting for them outside their doorsteps, on their streets, schoolyards, and classrooms. Increasingly, children are traumatized by prevailing social and societal loss issues in their families, their schools, their nation, and their world.

Text adapted with permission from Life and Loss: A Guide to Help Grievng Children, Breaking the Silence: A Guide To Help Children With Complicated Grief: Suicide, Homicide, AIDS, Violence, and Abuse and Helping The Grieving Child in the School Healing Magazine (Kidspeace)and Growing Up Fast (NES).
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